[Zope-dev] GADFLY Database: Can it lose data if the Zope process is aborted?

Joachim Werner joe@iuveno-net.de
Thu, 26 Jul 2001 23:18:13 +0200


> I don't know about the guts of Gadfly, but you may have run afoul of
> Python's file handling. The docs warn that data written to a file object
> can not be counted on to appear on the disk until it is either closed or
> flushed. (I think, though, that this is very rarely a problem when
> dealing with human timespans.) I would think that an orderly shutdown of
> Zope would instruct Gadfly to shutdown gracefully, but I can't be sure
> of that.

O.k., the time span was about a day, so normally that should mean that
everything has been flushed. But who knows? I have read something about a
Gadfly option that does long-time caching instead of frequent commits to the
file system. Whether that one is active in Zope's version of Gadfly I don't
know. Zope definitely does not shutdown "gracefully". Even if I use the
official "stop" skript it just kills the process ("kill" as in "killer").
That means that the sub-processes do not get a termination message or so.
They are just killed. The "stop" button may be a bit more graceful, but I
haven't checked that yet.

Joachim